NASA SBIR 00-1 SOLICITATION

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TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
We propose to exploit a new type of computing hardware and software to develop computers and circuits for remote manned and unmanned missions that are significantly more autonomous in dealing with faults or damage than current systems. The systems we will develop will contain self-repairing subsystems that, when given a single "rebuild" command by the system or by a person, can quickly diagnose their own hardware, detect and isolate faults, and use the remaining good hardware to reconstruct themselves. The system would be able to issue these "rebuild" commands to multiple subsystems at once, hastening the recovery procedure. Using our techniques plus redundancy and some arbitration, it is also possible to make the onboard system monitoring significantly more autonomous, distributed, and self-repairing.

The result of Phase I and II funding will be services and products. Our company will be able to provide a service to take fairly complex digital circuit designs and recast them as self-repairing circuits. On the product side, we will provide hardware/software systems that implement the desired circuits and rebuild themselves when faults are detected. The systems will not require external testing or diagnosis of system hardware, nor will they require externally guided repair.

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POTENTIAL COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS
The autonomous, self-repairing digital circuits we build can be used in systems that cannot easily be monitored or repaired, such as those in hazardous, extreme, or remote environments: spacecraft; earth orbit missions and deep space missions; satellites; military vessels; commercial or scientific probes used in ocean, space, and atmospheric explorations; monitoring and containment systems for hazardous materials and hazardous wastes; circuits onboard systems that are distributed over large areas and are expensive to maintain such as power grids, power lines, relay stations, radars, or monitoring stations.

They can also be used in critical systems that cannot "go down" or malfunction, such as life support systems, navigation systems and other critical systems on vessels, air traffic control systems, and robust electronics inside consumer devices such as automobiles and laptop computers.

They also provide opportunities to utilize imperfect silicon chips that are currently thrown away. Self monitor and self repair are also cornerstones to extremely large computing systems that may someday be provided cheaply by nanotechnology: the more components a system has, the more likely that at least one will fail.

The platform we developed could also provide a scalable processing layer for in situ sensor array processing.

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